The Lighthearted Quest (23 page)

For a moment she thought the old man was going to have a stroke. He became purple in the face, and looked as if he were going to choke.

“Monstrous!” he exploded. “This is absolutely monstrous! You must be a spy!”

“I'm
not
—I do assure you I'm not,” Julia said pleadingly. “I only want to get hold of Colin.”

“Well,
I
shall not help you—indeed I shall warn Lady Tracy about you! If you did succeed in contacting your cousin—if he
is
your cousin—he could not possibly go home now; no miserable estate, property, inheritance, is of comparable importance to the work he is engaged on! Oh, you
shock me!” The poor old man paused, looked wildly round, and as once before asked helplessly—

“Where was I?”

“You'd said Colin couldn't come home, however urgent it was,” Julia said, now really alarmed by his state. “But look, Mr. St John, I think you'd better go home. Let me go and find a taxi.”

“There are no taxis here. No, I will go to the Consulate, which is just opposite—if you will accompany me so far?”

Julia, rather penitent, took his arm and accompanied him to the gateway with the superb baroque plaster effigy of the Lion and the Unicorn stuck on the wall outside it; she rang a bell, a Moorish servant appeared, and led her old escort in through a pretty courtyard. But before Mr. St John disappeared he turned back to her and spoke again, with menacing finality.

“Go home. Give this up. Don't try to find him; make some other arrangement for his wretched inheritance.”

“I can't give it up, and I won't,” said Julia. “Oh, but I am so sorry.”

“Never mind that—you have been warned,” said Mr. St John, as the door of the Consulate closed behind him.

Julia was rather shaken by the painful termination of this interview. She liked Mr. St John, he had been, as she had told him, very kind to her, and now she had left him upset almost to the point of illness by her questions and assertions—upset moreover to such a degree as to have left her alone and unescorted in the street, in Fez. She made her way back to her small hotel without adventure, wondering on the way why anyone so old, and so easily made to lose his temper and inadvertently let things out, should be allowed to be in on anything so secret and so important as Colin's activities appeared to be—indeed as Mr. St John himself declared them to be. For really he had, if only by his rage, let out quite a lot. He had confirmed Bathyadis' implication that the Germans,
were the enemy—presumably the East Germans, in view of Mr. Bingham's remarks; and his violent reaction to her suggestion that a rare mineral of some sort was the object of the operation was tantamount to a confirmation of that idea, too. One did not turn purple and go completely to pieces about something that
wasn't
true. All rather exciting; and
fun,
really, Julia thought as she sat down to a thoroughly French lunch, nibbling the carved radishes among the
hors d'œuvres
with appetite, and shovelling in the sliced tomatoes, the hard-boiled eggs in mayonnaise, and the inevitable sardines.

One thing however bothered her—she had completely forgotten to ask Mr. St John about
cantines
before she embarked on the vexed subject of Colin. What a clot she was!—now he would tell her nothing, indeed he would probably never speak to her again. After she had consumed some veal followed by salad—the veal, she learned from the waiter, flown in from France—she asked to see the proprietor, who came to her in the little salon while she drank her coffee, and asked politely if he could be useful to her in anything?

Only to satisfy her curiosity, Julia said—she was in fact
journaliste,
and everything about Morocco was of great interest for her. The manager bowed, pleased and impressed; for some reason
hôteliers,
unlike the rest of mankind, have a passion for journalists. To what, he asked, was the curiosity of Mademoiselle directed? To something in Fez?

No, Julia said, not in Fez. She desired to know more about the
cantines
in the South of Morocco.

As it turned out, she could not have applied to a better person than the
patron.
The
cantines,
he told her, were the official hotels or rest-houses in small towns strung out along the bus-routes; a network of motor-buses now covered much of the Protectorate, and for the convenience of travellers there were, at the end of each day's stage, these
cantines
where they could spend the night, with bedrooms—yes, sometimes even with showers—a bar and a restaurant. Arab-style, of course—
all on one floor, rooms opening on a corridor on one side, usually on the garden on the other. He used to run one at Beni-Issar before he came to this hotel in Fez—ah, that was a fine
cantine,
the garden full of roses! Many were directed by ex-members of the Foreign Legion—he himself was
ancien légionnaire;
oddly enough, said the
patron,
expanding on what was clearly a favourite theme, many of these managers were Germans, who had joined the Legion between the two wars—after completing their term of service they married Arab or Berber wives, and abandoning the Fatherland settled down in Morocco as
cantiniers.

Julia was greatly pleased by this unexpected bonus, as it were, to her enquiries, which were usually so difficult, if not fruitless; she asked the
hôtelier,
as indifferently as she could, whether these expatriate Germans kept up any links with their homeland? Oh indeed yes; once a German, a German to all eternity, the Frenchman replied rather acidly; the door and the heart always open to never-mind-who of their compatriots! But did many Germans come to Morocco, Julia enquired. Yes, quite a few, especially in the last year or two. Tourists? Yes—and others besides.

Julia was rather nervous of risking any very direct questions about these others, even from the unsuspecting
patron
—she tried a more oblique angle. What sort of travellers went to the South, she wanted to know.

Oh,
colons
going to and from their farms, after shopping or business in Casablanca or Agadir; many Moors—with the advent of the autobus the Moors had become great travellers; then there were the members of the Administration of Indigenous Affairs, who frequented the bars, though they usually had official cars; and finally of course the personnel of the mines.

Julia pricked up her ears again, meanwhile carefully looking as stupid as possible.

“Mines? What mines?”

“For the chrome, principally, naturally. Does Mademoiselle, as a journalist, realise—“and out came a piece about Morocco producing so much of the valuable useful chrome.
That
was a place to see: the gaunt dressing-plants, the great refuse-heaps, the water-pumps, all in a perpetual haze of dust—
un paysage Dantesque,
said the landlord, with a surprising flight of imagination. Julia said that sounded fascinating, and she must try to get down to see it all, if she could arrange an escort. And was anything else mined besides chrome? Oh, yes—the cobalt, the molybdenum, strategic minerals of all sorts, so rich was the Protectorate; and new discoveries were being made all the time, as science advanced and the prospectors explored further and further. What a future lay there, for the whole country, if only the
sacrés nationalistes
would cease to make agitations, and recognise the benefits which France was bringing, and if those animals of Communists would desist from stirring up trouble!

The idea of communism in Morocco was new to Julia, and she allowed herself to be deflected into enquiring about that. Mostly in the big cities, she supposed?
Mais non!
—there probably also, but they were everywhere, even down in that desolate country of the mines: talking to these poor ignorant creatures of Berbers, creating discontent, denouncing la France, who had done all, but
all,
for the country—he had seen this going on with his own eyes. Many of them were Spaniards who had fled after the Civil War and now sought only to undermine the well-being of other happier people by playing on nationalist feeling, and exciting the envy of those who, for the first time in their lives earning a regular, a decent wage, instead of being at the mercy of droughts and bad harvests, yet saw that their employers were richer than themselves—most naturally. “For developing mines, for machinery, for paying wages,
capital
is required, Mademoiselle; and what capital can the Berber offer? His she-camel and his ass!” Julia laughed, and asked if the Communists were more dangerous,
injurious, than the broadcasts from Cairo, remembering Mr. St John's remarks. The landlord fairly exploded.

“But Mademoiselle, it is one and the same thing! Moscow courts the Arab world today, and fosters, if not finances, Moslem nationalism for her own ends; she desires a pan-Arab North Africa, a single unit from Egypt to Morocco, communist-dominated. Ah, their eyes will be opened,
ces pauvres bougres,
if this ever comes to pass!”

Communism, Julia reflected, was one thing that de Foucauld had not foreseen. But though all this would come in very nicely for an article she had her own fish to fry; and presently she reverted to the matter of the mines. Where were they?

South of the Atlas—but a new area, whose development had only started a year or so ago, lay further south still near Tindouf, practically
en pleine Sahara;
this was enormously rich, and as it was situated inland from the Spanish territory of the Rio do Ouro, the construction of a railway to bring the products out onto the French coast was in contemplation. And how, Julia asked, were the products from the older mines, south of the Sahara, taken to the coast? (This was a question in the answer to which she felt the deepest interest.) Was there a railway? Ah no, all went by
camion;
the value of the exports, especially of the cobalt, made even the vast expense involved by lorry transport worth while, especially to such powerful interests as the
concessionaires
who were behind the affair.

Hum, Julia thought—lorry-loads of velvet trunks, perhaps? But the word
concessionaire
caught her attention, and she asked about that. Oh, quite evidently for the exploitation and still more the export of strategic minerals a concession from the Government was necessary; nothing was possible without it. Legally, that is to say; of course one heard rumours of underhand doings. The landlord shrugged his shoulders.

Underhand doings by whom? the girl asked.

Oh, but naturally by these detestable Germans!

“But do they not have concessions?” Julia enquired, now
easily recalling what Mr. Bingham had said about the East Germans having actually started the drive for the rarer minerals.

“Some do, some do not,” the landlord answered. “I, I have my friends down there, my sources of information; and you may believe me when I say to you that there is plenty of dirty work going on, illicit exploiting and exporting, to avoid paying the heavy fees for concessions and export licences.”

“But how do they manage it?” Julia asked, genuinely interested—cobalt-running was still quite a new idea. Was this what lay behind the tip-off that Mr. Bingham professed to have given her, when he said that a nod was as good as a wink?

“Oh, these types have their methods—disguises, false passports; heavy bribes, naturally, to right and left; and the commodity itself concealed in something else, so that it appears other than what it is,” said the landlord breezily. “And they stick at nothing,
ces messieurs-là
—if anyone becomes too curious he is liable to have a nasty accident. For my part, I am glad that I am no longer in the South, things have become so unpleasant down there. Imagine to yourself that an official was killed, not so long ago, in the bar of my own
cantine!”

“Good heavens! How?”

“With a home-made bomb. Several were injured, but they made sure of the man they wanted, who had been too pertinacious in his enquiries, and knew too much.”

“But weren't they caught?—the ones who threw it, I mean?”

The
patron
gave another shrug.

“Mademoiselle, whenever a bomb is thrown in Morocco it is thrown by a nationalist terrorist, or by a counter-terrorist!—so at least it can always be said, and will always be believed. This affords a wonderful camouflage to murder for quite other motives, such as commercial or international rivalry.”

“How beastly,” said Julia slowly. She was thinking of Mr. St John's words—“possibly mortally dangerous”—if she persisted in enquiring for Colin. Perhaps this particular piece of detection wasn't going to be quite so much fun, after all.

In Julia's favourite books on detection, much time was always spent in reflecting on evidence, checking it over, and summing it up to assess its importance—most detectives, whether professional or amateur, wrote down lists of suspects or telling facts in parallel columns for the help of the active-minded reader. Her two conversations that day had given her so much to chew over that a sheet of paper and a pencil would have been a great help, but she decided against this—who knew but that Abdul or the squinting man might not get into her room, somehow? Seated in that same room, after her very revealing talk with the
patron,
she did the best she could in her head.

What had she got? She counted it out, slowly.

From Mr. St John's intemperate exclamations she now knew pretty positively that it was the Germans who were Bathyadis' “enemies”, and from the same indiscreet source she had quite sufficient confirmation of the fact that what Colin and the red-haired man were doing was to ship some mineral out of Morocco. It must be very rare and very important, in veiw of the poor old gentleman's insistence that Colin must stay where he was, inheritance or no inheritance—and Julia paused for a long time to consider this aspect of the matter. If it would really be impossible, or even wrong, for Colin to come home, was there any point in going on with her search?—especially if it might possibly involve him in danger? The landlord's account of the metal racket certainly sounded as if that could be true, and Julia placed rather more reliance on his statements than on Mr. St John's angry ejaculations. On the other hand it seemed very silly to have come so far and learned so much, and then give up now, without at least seeing Colin. If she could manage to see him she could
anyhow tell him the situation at Glentoran, and then let him decide for himself; he was twenty-three, after all, and quite old enough to make up his own mind where his duty lay.